Moto x phone presented by motorola

The long-awaited Moto X is finally on sale in the US, and it’s something of a landmark smartphone.

Designed and built to reinvigorate the Motorola brand, it's also bringing to bear the fruits of the company’s relationship with Google, which now owns Motorola Mobility outright. Sporting a clean(ish) version of Android 4.2.2 and Google Now-powered touch-free voice control, it seems as much a Google device as a Motorola one.

And, as we've become accustomed to with all of Google's projects, be it the Nexus 5, Glass or the Motorola Moto G, the X is a lovely piece of hardware.

The Moto X is highly customisable. The Moto Maker site allows you to order a personalised handset, selecting from one of two front colours, 18 back colours and seven accent colours. You’ll also be able to have a custom message printed on the back of the phone, and choose between 16GB and 32GB storage capacities. The handset will be built for you in the US and shipped for free in less than four days.

Buying in-store restricts you to one of two colours (white or black) and a 16GB capacity. We were sent a standard white 16GB AT&T model to review, which is a shame, of course, but who are we to complain?

It’s a sturdily-built phone with a solid two-piece construction and an HTC One-style curved back (made of Kevlar) that fits snugly and comfortably in your hand. The Gorilla Glass-fronted screen runs almost edge-to-edge, making the X smaller than other 4.7in phones such as the Google Nexus 4. Basically, this is a phone designed for all hand sizes, and you won’t need giant goalkeeper meatplates to hold it comfortably. It weighs a fairly average 130g.

As with most higher-end Android phones, the only physical controls are a power/home button and a volume rocker, both located on the right edge.

The Moto X rocks a 4.7in AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 and pixel density of 312ppi. That’s a little less than the 326ppi offered by the iPhone 5’s Retina display, but it’s plenty sharp: you can’t pick out individual pixels without bringing your eyeballs stupidly close to the screen.

The screen is the same size and almost the same resolution as the Google Nexus 4’s display, but when put side-by-side there are notable differences. The X’s AMOLED tech gives colours a richer, more saturated look and contrast is punchier. On the downside, whites aren’t as pure and bright as on the Nexus 4 and we found it difficult to pick out details in bright sunlight.

Videos, games and photos all look gorgeous here. It might not be the sharpest or largest of displays, but it fits into Motorola’s plan to keep the X friendly: the lower resolution helps prolong battery life and the size ensures the phone doesn’t become unwieldy.

BEEFY SPECSThe X sports a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon Pro chipset clocked at 1.7GHz, plus 2GB of RAM. It might not sound like the most muscular of specs on paper, and compared to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One that might be the case – but it’s well above average for a smartphone. There’s NFC and 4G LTE support too.

Benchmarking with AnTuTu, the X garnered a rating of just over 18,000, making it comparable in processing and graphics power to the Google Nexus 4, Sony Xperia Z and Samsung Galaxy S3. And in practice it’s a zippy performer, allowing you to flick through photo galleries and menus and play most games with nary a stutter. Just don't expect it to run the next generation of power-hungry games.

The “standard” edition of the Moto X comes with 16GB of space, and around 4GB of that is already accounted for when you take the phone out of the box. You do however get 50GB of Google Drive cloud storage.

The Moto X is probably the best phone Motorola has ever produced. While it doesn’t push the boundaries for processing performance, photographic skills or screen size, it’s a phone that’s designed to be easy to live with and easy to use – and it hits its marks perfectly. The long battery life, sturdy build, pocket-friendly size and various user-orientated interface tweaks and apps make the X one of the friendliest smartphones around.

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